Summary

Eldrazi and Taxes (or Eldrazi Death and Taxes) is a hard deck to describe. On one hand, you could consider it an aggro deck. However, describing it as such completely ignores how the deck wants to operate, which is disrupting the opponent’s game plan while gaining value through cards like Aether Vial and Thought-Knot Seer. There’s a lot going on in this archetype, with several moving pieces creating very potent combinations that can give you a massive advantage in any game you play. More than anything, Eldrazi and Taxes is looking to play aggressively costed creatures that line up well against the Modern format as a whole.

This specific list, piloted by Tigas on MtGO on January 5, goes halfway between traditional Death and Taxes and the full Eldrazi suite that some lists have been playing. The notable Eldrazi absence from this list is Reality Smasher, which gives the deck a more aggressive slant. In many ways, Eldrazi and Taxes exists not as an individually powerful deck (like most of the format), but rather as a collective of individually powerful cards within the context of Modern as a whole. The argument could even be made that Eldrazi and Taxes would do worse in Standard than it currently does in Modern. Leonin Arbiter is a powerful card in a format where fetchlands are everywhere, and the addition of Ghost Quarter creates a powerful combination that many decks are unable to cope with. Thalia, Guardian of Thraben helps massively against spell-dense decks, and cards like Wasteland Strangler and Brimaz, King of Oreskos help the deck to dominate the board against decks that are filled with small, low-costed creatures.

Before the adaptation of Eldrazi into Death and Taxes, the deck tended to struggle due to its lack of hand disruption and inconsistency. Additionally, the deck’s creatures were all small and did not make a large enough impact per turn, so the deck would run out of steam. However, with Eldrazi in the deck, these problems are more or less solved. Now, the issues with the deck lie less with weaknesses in the deck itself, but rather poor matchups here and there in the format that prevent the deck from reaching its full potential. For example, while Infect tends to be a fairly good matchup for Eldrazi and Taxes, Affinity is too fast for the deck to handle.

Wizards of the Coast has shown a willingness to print more aggressively costed hate-bears. This means that Eldrazi and Taxes will only improve over time. Because of this, if this deck intrigues you, I highly recommend that you build it and learn it. I would bet that this deck will be a powerhouse of the format in the near future. Here are the changes I would make going forward: